“The New Negro”
Alain Locke
In the last decade something beyond the watch and guard of statistics has happened in the life
of the American Negro and the three norns who have traditionally presided over the Negro problem
have a changeling in their laps. The Sociologist, The Philanthropist, the Race-leader are not unaware
of the New Negro but they are at a loss to account for him. He simply cannot be swathed in their
formulae. For the younger generation is vibrant with a new psychology; the new spirit is awake in the
masses, and under the very eyes of the professional observers is transforming what has been a
perennial problem into the progressive phases of contemporary negro life.
Could such a metamorphosis have taken place as suddenly as it has appeared to? The answer
is no; not because the New Negro is not here, but because the Old Negro had long become more of a
myth than a man. The Old Negro, we must remember, was a creature of moral debate and historical
controversy. His has been a stock figure perpetuated as an historical fiction partly in innocent
sentimentalism, partly in deliberate reactionism. The Negro himself has contributed his share to this
through a sort of protective social mimicry forced upon him by the adverse circumstances of
dependence. So for generations in the mind of America, the Negro has been more of a formula than a
human being --a something to be argued about, condemned or defended, to be "kept down," or "in his
place," or "helped up," to be worried with or worried over, harassed or patronized, a social bogey or a
social burden. The thinking Negro even has been induced to share this same general attitude, to focus
his attention on controversial issues, to see himself in the distorted perspective of a social problem.
His shadow, so to speak, has been more real to him than his personality. Through having had to
appeal from the unjust stereotypes of his oppressors and traducers to those of his liberators, friends
and benefactors he has subscribed to the traditional positions from which his case has been viewed.
Little true social or self-understanding has or could come from such a situation.
But while the minds of most of us, black and white, have thus burrowed in the trenches of the
Civil War and Reconstruction, the actual march of development has simply flanked these positions,
necessitating a sudden reorientation of view. We have not been watching in the right direction; set
worth and South on a sectional axis, eve have not noticed the East till the sun has us blinking.
Recall how suddenly the Negro spirituals revealed themselves; suppressed for generations
under the stereotypes of Wesleyan hymn harmony, secretive, half-ashamed, until the courage of being
natural brought them out--and behold, there was folk-music. Similarly the mind of the Negro seems
suddenly to have slipped from under the tyranny of social intimidation and to be shaking off the
psychology of imitation and implied inferiority. By shedding the old chrysalis of the Negro problem
we are achieving somethinglike a spiritual emancipation. Until recently, lacking selfunderstanding,
we have been almost as much of a problem to ourselves as we still are to others. But the decade that
found us with a problem has left us with only a task. The multitude perhaps feels as yet only a strange
relief and a new vague urge, but the thinking few know that in the reaction the vital inner grip of
prejudice has been broken.
With this renewed self-respect and self-dependence, the life of the Negro community is
bound to enter a new dynamic phase, the buoyancy from within compensating for whatever pressure
there may be of conditions from without. The migrant masses, shifting from countryside to city,
hurdle several generations of experience at a leap, but more important, the same thing happens
spiritually in the life-attitudes and self-expression of the Young Negro, in his poetry, his art, his
education and his new outlook, with the additional advantage, of course, of the poise and greater
certainty of knowing what it is all about. From this comes the promise and warrant of a new
leadership. As one of them has discerningly put it:
We have tomorrow
Bright before us
Like a flame.
Yesterday, a night-gone thing
A sun-down name.
And dawn today
Broad arch above the road we came.
We march!
This is what, even more than any "most creditable record of fifty years of freedom," requires
that the Negro of today be seen through other than the dusty spectacles of past controversy. The day
of "aunties," "uncles" and "mammies" is equally gone. Uncle Tom and Sambo have passed on, and
even the "Colonel" and "George" play barnstorm roles from which they escape with relief when the
public spotlight is off. The popular melodrama has about played itself out, and it is time to scrap the
fictions, garret the bogeys and settle down to a realistic facing of facts.
FIRST we must observe some of the changes which since the traditional lines of opinion were
drawn have rendered these quite obsolete. A main change has been, of course, that shifting of the
Negro population which has made the Negro problem no longer exclusively or even predominantly
Southern. Why should our minds remain sectionalized, when the problem itself no longer is? Then the
trend of migration has not only been toward the North and the Central Midwest, but city-ward and to
the great centers of industry--the problems of adjustment are new, practical, local and not peculiarly
racial. Rather they are an integral part of the large industrial and social problems of our present-day
democracy. And finally, with the Negro rapidly in process of class differentiation, if it ever was
warrantable to regard and treat the Negro en masse it is becom ing with every day less possible, more
unjust and more ridiculous.
The Negro too, for his part, has idols of the tribe to smash. If on the one hand the white man has erred
in making the Negro appear to be that which would excuse or extenuate his treatment of him, the
Negro, in turn, has too often unnecessarily excused himself because of the way he has been treated.
The intelligent Negro of today is resolved not to make discrimination an extenuation for his
shortcomings in performance, individual or collective; he is trying to hold himself at par, neither
inflated by sentimental allowances nor depreciated by current social discounts. For this he must know
himself and be known for precisely what he is, and for that reason he welcomes the new scientific
rather than the old sentimental interest. Sentimental interest in the Negro has ebbed. We used to
lament this as the falling off of our friends; now we rejoice and pray to be delivered both from selfpity and condescension. The mind of each racial group has had a bitter weaning, apathy or hatred on
one side matching disillusionment or resentment on the other; but they face each other today with the
possibility at least of entirely new mutual attitudes.
It does not follow that if the Negro were better known, he would be better liked or better
treated. But mutual understanding is basic for any subsequent cooperation and adjustment. The effort
toward this will at least have the effect of remedying in large part what has been the most
unsatisfactory feature of our present stage of race relationships in America, namely the fact that the
more intelligent and representative elements of the two race groups have at so many points got quite
out of vital touch with one another.
The fiction is that the life of the races is separate and increasingly so. The fact is that they have
touched too closely at the unfavorable and too lightly at the favorable levels.
While inter-racial councils have sprung up in the South, drawing on forward elements of both races,
in the Northern cities manual laborers may brush elbows in their everyday work, but the community
and business leaders have experienced no such interplay or far too little of it. These segments must
achieve contact or the race situation in America becomes desperate. Fortunately this is happening.
There is a growing realization that in social effort the cooperative basis must supplant long-distance
philanthropy, and that the only safeguard for mass relations in the future must be provided in the
carefully maintained contacts of the enlightened minorities of both race groups. In the intellectual
realm a renewed and keen curiosity is replacing the recent apathy; the Negro is being carefully
studied, not just talked about and discussed. In art and letters, instead of being wholly caricatured, he
is being seriously portray eel and painted .
To all of this the New Negro is keenly responsive as an augury of a new democracy in
American culture. He is contributing his share to the new social understanding. But the desire to be
understood would never in itself have been sufficient to have opened so completely the protectively
closed portals of the thinking Negro's mind. There is still too much possibility of being snubbed or
patronized for that. It was rather the necessity for fuller, truer, self-expression, the realization of the
unwisdom of allowing social discrimination to segregate him mentally, and a counter-attitude to
cramp and fetter his own living--and so the "spite-wall" that the intellectuals built over the "colorline" has happily been taken down. Much of this reopening of intellectual Contacts has Entered in
New York and has been richly fruitful not merely in the enlarging of personal experience, but in the
definite enrichment of American art and letters and in the clarifying of our common vision of the
social tasks ahead.
The particular significance in the reestablishment of contact between the more advanced and
representative classes is that it promises to offset some of the unfavorable reactions of the past, or at
least to re-surface race contacts somewhat for the future. Subtly the conditions that are moulding a
New Negro are moulding a new American attitude.
However, this new phase of things is delicate; it will call for less charity but more justice; less
help, but infinitely closer understanding. This is indeed a critical stage of race relationships because
of the likelihood, if the new temper is not understood, of engendering sharp group antagonism and a
second crop of more calculated prejudice. In some quarters, it has already done so. Having weaned
the Negro, public opinion cannot continue to paternalize. The Negro today is inevitably moving
forward under the control largely of his own objectives. What are these objectives? Those of his outer
life are happily already well and finally formulated, for they are none other than the ideals of
American institutions and democracy. Those of his inner life are yet in process of formation, for the
new psychology at present is more of a consensus of feeling than of opinion, of attitude rather than of
program. Still some points seem to have crystallized.
UP to the present one may adequately describe the Negro's "inner objectives" as an attempt to
repair a damaged group psychology and reshape a warped social perspective. Their realization has
required a new mentality for the American Negro. And as it matures we begin to see its effects; at
first, negative, iconoclastic, and then positive and constructive. In this new group psychology we note
the lapse of sentimental appeal, then the development of a more positive self-respect and selfreliance; the repudiation of social dependence, and then the gradual recovery from hypersensitiveness and "touchy" nerves, the repudiation of the double standard of judgment with its special
philanthropic allowances and then the sturdier desire for objective and scientific appraisal; and finally
the rise from social disillusionment to race pride, from the sense of social debt to the responsibilities
of social contribution, and offsetting the necessary working and commonsense acceptance of
restricted conditions, the belief in ultimate esteem and recognition. Therefore the Negro today wishes
to be known for what he is, even in his faults and shortcomings, and scorns a craven and precarious
survival at the price of seeming to be what he is not. He resents being spoken for as a social ward or
minor, even by his own, and to being regarded a chronic patient for the sociological clinic, the sick
man of American Democracy. For the same reasons he himself is through with those social nostrums
and panaceas, the so-called "solutions" of his "problem," with which he and the country have been so
liberally dosed in the past. Religion, freedom, education, money--in turn, he has ardently hoped for
and peculiarly trusted these things; he still believes in them, but not in blind trust that they alone will
solve his life-problem.
Each generation, however, will have its creed and that of the present is the belief in the
efficacy of collective efforts in race cooperation. This deep feeling of race is at present the mainspring
of Negro life. It seems to be the outcome of the reaction to proscription and prejudice; an attempt,
fairly successful on the whole, to convert a defensive into an offensive position, a handicap into an
incentive. It is radical in tone, but not in purpose and only the most stupid forms of opposition,
misunderstanding or persecution could make it otherwise. Of course, the thinking Negro has shifted a
little toward the left with the world-trend, and there is an increasing group who affiliate with radical
and liberal movements. But fundamentally for the present the Negro is radical on race matters,
conservative on others, in other words, a "forced radical," a social protestant rather than a genuine
radical. Yet under further pressure and injustice iconoclastic thought and motives will inevitably
increase. Harlem's quixotic radicalisms call for their ounce of democracy today lest tomorrow they be
beyond cure.
The Negro mind reaches out as yet to nothing but American wants, American ideas. But this
forced attempt to build his Americanism on race values is a unique social experiment, and its ultimate
success is impossible except through the fullest sharing of American culture and institutions. There
should be no delusion about this. American nerves in sections unstrung with race hysteria are often
fed the opiate that the trend of Negro advance is wholly separatist, and that the effect of its operation
will be to encyst the Negro as a benign foreign body in the body politic. This cannot be--even if it
were desirable. The racialism of the Negro is no limitation or reservation with respect to American
life; it is only a constructive effort to build the obstructions in the stream of his progress into an
efficient dam of social energy and power. Democracy itself is obstructed and stagnated to the extent
that any of its channels are closed. Indeed they cannot be selectively closed. So the choice is not
between one way for the Negro and another way for the rest, but between American institutions
frustrated on the one hand and American ideals progressively fulfilled and realized on the other.
There is, of course, a warrantably comfortable feeling in being on the right side of the country's
professed ideals. We realize that we cannot be undone without America's undoing. It is within the
gamut of this attitude that the thinking Negro faces America, but the variations of mood in connection
with it are if anything more significant than the attitude itself. Sometimes we have it taken with the
defiant ironic challenge of McKay:
Mine is the future grinding down today
Like a great landslip moving to the sea,
Bearing its freight of debris far away
Where the green hungry waters restlessly
Heave mammoth pyramids and break and roar
Their eerie challenge to the crumbling shore.
Sometimes, perhaps more frequently as yet, in the fervent and almost filial appeal and counsel of
Weldon Johnson's:
O Southland, dear Southland!
Then why do you still cling
To an idle age and a musty page,
To a dead and useless thing.
But between defiance and appeal, midway almost between cynicism and hope, the prevailing
mind stands in the mood of the same author's To America, an attitude of sober query and stoical
challenge:
How would you have us, as we are?
Or sinking heath the load we bear,
Our eyes fixed forward on a star,
Or gazing empty at despair?
Rising or falling? Men or things?
With dragging pace or footsteps fleet?
Strong, willing sinews in your wings,
Or tightening chains about your feet?
More and more, however, an intelligent realization of the great discrepancy between the
American social creed and the American social practice forces upon the Negro the taking of the moral
advantage that is his. Only the steadying and sobering effect of a truly characteristic gentleness of
spirit prevents the rapid rise of a definite cynicism and counter-hate and a defiant superiority feeling.
Human as this reaction would be, the majority still deprecate its advent, and would gladly see it
forestalled by the speedy amelioration of its causes. We wish our race pride to be a healthier, more
positive achievement than a feeling based upon a realization of the shortcomings of others. But all
paths toward the attainment of a sound social attitude have been difficult; only a relatively few
enlightened minds have been able as the phrase puts it "to rise above" prejudice. The ordinary man
has had until recently only a hard choice between the alternatives of supine and humiliating
submission and stimulating but hurtful counter-prejudice. Fortunately from some inner, desperate
resourcefulness has recently sprung up the simple expedient of fighting prejudice by mental passive
resistance, in other words by trying to ignore it. For the few, this manna may perhaps be effective, but
the masses cannot thrive on it.
FORTUNATELY there are constructive channels opening out into which the balked social
feelings of the American Negro can flow freely.
Without them there would be much more pressure and danger than there is. These compensating
interests are racial but in a new and enlarged way. One is the consciousness of acting as the advanceguard of the African peoples in their contact with Twentieth Century civilization; the other, the sense
of a mission of rehabilitating the race in world esteem from that loss of prestige for which the fate and
conditions of slavery have so largely been responsible. Harlem, as we shall see, is the center of both
these movements; she is the home of the Negro's "Zionism." The pulse of the Negro world has begun
to beat in Harlem. A Negro newspaper carrying news material in English, French and Spanish,
gathered from all quarters of America, the West Indies and Africa has maintained itself in Harlem for
over five years. Two important magazines, both edited from New York, maintain their news and
circulation consistently on a cosmopolitan scale. Under American auspices and backing, three panAfrican congresses have been held abroad for the discussion of common interests, colonial questions
and the future cooperative development of Africa. In terms of the race question as a world problem,
the Negro mind has leapt, so to speak, upon the parapets of prejudice and extended its cramped
horizons. In so doing it has linked up with the growing group consciousness of the dark-peoples and
is gradually learning their common interests. As one of our writers has recently put it: "It is
imperative that we understand the white world in its relations to the nonwhite world." As with the
Jew, persecution is making the Negro international.
As a world phenomenon this wider race consciousness is a different thing from the much asserted
rising tide of color. Its inevitable causes are not of our making. The consequences are not necessarily
damaging to the best interests of civilization. Whether it actually brings into being new Armadas of
conflict or argosies of cultural exchange and enlightenment can only be decided by the attitude of the
dominant races in an era of critical change. With the American Negro his new internationalism is
primarily an effort to recapture contact with the scattered peoples of African derivation. Garveyism
may be a transient, if spectacular, phenomenon, but the possible role of the American Negro in the
future development of Africa is one of the most constructive and universally helpful missions that any
modern people can lay claim to.
Constructive participation in such causes cannot help giving the Negro valuable group
incentives, as well as increased prestige at home and abroad. Our greatest rehabilitation may possibly
come through such channels, but for the present, more immediate hope rests in the revaluation by
white and black alike of the Negro in terms of his artistic endowments and cultural contributions, past
and prospective. It must be increasingly recognized that the Negro has already made very substantial
contributions, not only in his folk-art, music especially, which has always found appreciation, but in
larger, though humbler and less acknowledged ways. For generations the Negro has been the peasant
matrix of that section of America which has most undervalued him, and here he has contributed not
only materially in labor and in social patience, but spiritually as well. The South has unconsciously
absorbed the gift of his folk-temperament. In less than half a generation it will be easier to recognize
this, but the fact remains that a leaven of humor, sentiment, imagination and tropic nonchalance has
gone into the making of the South from a humble, unacknowledged source. A second crop of the
Negro's gifts promises still more largely. He now becomes a conscious contributor and lays aside the
status of d beneficiary and ward for that of a collaborator and participant in American civilization.
The great social gain in this is the releasing of our talented group from the arid fields of controversy
and debate to the productive fields of creative expression. The especially cultural recognition they
win should in turn prove the key to that revaluation of the Negro which must precede or accompany
any considerable further betterment of race relationships. But whatever the general effect, the present
generation will have added the motives of self-expression and spiritual development to the old and
still unfinished task of making material headway and progress. No one who understandingly faces the
situation with its substantial accomplishment or views the new scene with its still more abundant
promise can be entirely without hope. And certainly, if in our lifetime the Negro should not be able to
celebrate his full initiation into American democracy, he can at least, on the warrant of these things,
celebrate the attainment of a significant and satisfying new phase of group development, and with it a
spiritual Coming of Age.
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